Read travel guides, food recommendations, heritage insights and practical tips for experiencing Kolkata like a local.
For most of a century, dusk in Kolkata turned a specific shade of amber-yellow — the colour of a sodium-vapour streetlamp. Cities everywhere are switching to white LEDs now, and that particular colour of evening is quietly running out.
Read more
Built from a 1956 British design in a factory that stopped making them over a decade ago, Kolkata's yellow Ambassador taxi became the city's icon anyway — and is now being retired, one 15-year-old chassis at a time.
Read more
Pinned to a board outside a tea stall, a single copy of the morning paper gets read, argued over, and passed along by a dozen people who never pay for it — a small daily ritual with a surprisingly organised history behind it.
Read more
No Bengali morning is complete without a trip to the bajar — and no trip to the bajar is complete without the ritual lifting of a gill, the haggling, and the walk home with a fish wrapped in newspaper, tail end peeking out.
Read more
In a few hundred metres of North Kolkata lane, straw skeletons are wrapped in river mud and, over a few weeks each year, turned into ten thousand arms, a demon, a lion, and a goddess with eyes that haven't been painted yet.
Read more
A spongy square wrapped in cheap printed paper, sold beside the tea stall for less than a coin is worth anywhere else — Bapuji Cake has been Bengal's constant since 1973, named, almost by accident, after Gandhi.
Read more
Bolted to street corners across old Kolkata, a cast-iron lion's head once decided whether a neighbourhood drank clean water or didn't. Most have gone silent now, but the city still walks past them every day.
Read more
Somewhere past two in the afternoon, Kolkata quietly agrees to stop. Shutters half-close, a cat claims a weighing scale, a whole city exhales into rice, dal, and a nap it has never been talked out of.
Read more
Kolkata is the only city left on Earth where a human being still pulls another through the street by hand. A look at the migrant workers who keep a century-old trade alive, and the monsoon lanes that still depend on it.
Read more
For 151 years, one vehicle moved through this city at the pace of thought, rang its bell through the chaos, and asked nothing more than that you slow down. In September 2024, Kolkata's trams came to an end. Almost.
Read more
In Kolkata, tea is not a beverage — it is the setting for every argument, confession, and quiet understanding the city has ever produced. This is what a small clay cup actually contains.
Read more
Tucked into the older lanes of North Kolkata, a handful of cabin restaurants still serve fish fry and kobiraji cutlets from kitchens without refrigerators — relics of a colonial encounter that Bengali cooks quietly made their own.
Read more
Kolkata's nightlife doesn't announce itself. It hides in dim-lit bars that smell of decades, spills out onto Park Street long after midnight, and keeps an entire alternative music scene alive.
Read more
Long before the city had a skyline worth speaking of, Kolkata's zamindars built mansions of astonishing ambition — and the world they created inside them shaped Bengali culture for two centuries.
Read more
Long before Indian cricket filled stadiums, two football clubs divided a city along fault lines of land, language, and longing — and the wound, still open, is the most alive thing about Kolkata.
Read more
In the shadow of some of the subcontinent's oldest universities, a kilometre of Kolkata trades in books, argument, and kochuri — and has done so, in roughly the same spirit, for over a century.
Read more
Before traffic thickens, the bridge belongs to porters, flower sellers, and photographers. Its history runs parallel to their routines — part engineering feat, part daily ritual between two cities.
Read more
From early settlements near Bowbazar to the restaurant-lined lanes of Tangra, Kolkata's Chinese community reshaped how the city eats—while quietly absorbing and reflecting the culture around them.
Read more
Behind a row of aging red brick buildings near Bow Bazaar, Bow Barracks still holds fragments of Kolkata's Anglo-Indian life—especially in December, when music, cake, and memory return to the courtyard.
Read more
